THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.* M. MADELm's new volume on the Revolution
would of itself justify the existence of the "National History of France," which Is appearing in six volumes by different skilled hands. It is the book for which we have long waited, giving form and colour to the results attained by the numerous French scholars who have been for many years past studying the Revolutionary era. M. Madelin, like so many French historians of the modern school, wears the burden of his learning lightly. He has absorbed a whole library in the preparation for his task, and yet his book is as dramatic and readable as Michelet's or Carlyle's. He corrects many a misapprehension, disposes of many an old error ; nevertheless, he makes the story as thrilling as ever. No one within our experience has presented the-tragic duel of Danton and Robespierre with greater vividness or explained more clearly the fall of the " sea-green incor- ruptible." There is a touch of genius in the account of Robespierre's last evening at the Hotel de Ville, hesitating to appeal to arms while his enemies were mustering the Sections, and struck down by the gendarme's bullet at the moment when he was affixing his tardy signature to the decree for an insurrection. M. Madelin' a literary art is shown in the paragraph that immediately follows :-
" In the cool darkness, Paris grew calmer ; in many quarters men knew nothing of the bloody drama ; the Opera had given Armide ; at the Opera-Comique Paul et Virginie had been played. Only at the Theatre des Sans-Culottes the words ` No Performance ' had been posted up. The incident was to assume a symbolic meaning."
We who live in a great city can understand that paragraph now, and realize that one quarter may witness stirring events which to the rest of tho town remain unknown until the newspapers come round. One great merit of M. Madelin's book is that it shows not only how such astounding events as the fall of Robespierre did not affect the normal life of Paris, but also how the Revolution itself was, after the early days, essentially the work of a minority—often of a very small minority— whom France watched with a more or less detached interest until Napoleon came. There can of course be no doubt that in May, 1789, all Frenchmen desired the reform of the worn-out system of government, but very few indeed wished to go far. Had Louis XVI. been a wise man, he could have compromised with the middle-class delegates at a very early stage in the history of the National Assembly. As it was, a small and persistent minority of Jacobins steadily drove the conservative mass down the revolutionary slope, and the Court by its feeble hesitation helped rather than hindered them. The true story of the taking of the Bastille, which will be new to many of AL Madelin's readers, illustrates this argument. The affair was not at all a spontaneous uprising of the Parisians against tyranny, to avenge the dismissal of Necker. On the contrary, it was the work of a mob of hungry and desperate workmen combined with bandits who had entered Paris and begun to pillage
• The French Revolution. By Louis Madelin. London: William Heinemann. rim 64. new
houses and shops. The Bastille was " nothing but a bogy fortress,"
held by ninety-five pensioners and thirty Swiss Guards, and containing only seven prisoners—four coiners, two madmen, and a debauchers The garrison easily drove the mob away with a volley or two, but it surrendered when the mutinous Garde-Fransaise appeared on the scene, and the governor was foully murdered. The municipal authorities had begun to organize the National Guard to repress disorder, but through the insane ineptitude of the Court they were not given arms. Hence the mob had all its own way on July 14th. The burgesses were dismayed. But when they "beard next morning that the deputies at Versailles considered the day had been a glorious one, they began to
think they had better get some glory out of it themselves " :- " The very men who had been banding themselves together on the evening of the lath to resist disorder, and had looked on the taking of the Bastille as an act of ` brigandage,' would have had the whole enter- prise hailed on the 15th as one undertaken by the City of Paris against despotism. They gloried in that which had been their own defeat. And to give themselves a right to glory in it, they too transformed what had been the act of ruffians into the performance of heroes. The National Guard, organized to put down the rising, was given the credit of having wrought the Revolution of Freedom. Thus, out of a mighty lie, a new era sprang into life. Liberty was smirched from the first moment of her birth, and the misunderstanding thus created was destined never to be cleared up."
M. Madelin, it will be aeon, is no partisan. He sees the grievous faults of all the different sections, and is entirely free from the tendency, so visible in Mignet and the older French historians, to whitewash the Jacobins and Terrorists because they called themselVes Republicans. He says frankly that the Civil Constitution imposed on the clergy was the worst and most fatal mistake made by the Constituent Assembly, since it forced even the mild Louis XVI. into opposition and alienated all pious folk from the Revolutionary party. He recognizes Denton's good points, but he brushes away the sophistries by which it has been sought to dissociate Denton from the horrible massacres in the Paris prisons on September 2nd, 1792 :— " The Commune was determined on the massacre as a method of inspiring terror. Denton was determined to be blind. Carnage. indeed, was by no means repugnant to his fierce nature ; he would have given orders for the bloodshed, if he had thought it necessary he allowed it to go forward, believing it to be inevitable ; the crime lies heavy on the memory of a man who in spite of all was not an utter monster."
It is a fact that the actual murderers only numbered a hundred and fifty, and that this handful of wretches were loft for three days to work their will on the unhappy nobles and priests in the prisons, of whom sixteen hundred and fourteen perished. In his excellent chapters on the Convention, M. Madelin emphasizes the position of the Centre party, far the largest in number, which was alternately attracted to the Girondins and to the Mountain, and only decided to act for itself when Robespierre had by sheer excess of terrorism forced his old asso- ciates like Tallien to break with him in order to save their own heads. The fall of Robespierre on the 9th Then/rider was the work of the Centre, and from that day the forces of moderation gradually obtained the mastery. The Directory seized the reins of power and maintained itself for a time by sheer despotism, but the vast majority of French- men wanted a settled government and were only too ready to submit themselves to Bonaparte when his hour struck. M. Madelin touches lightly on military affairs—we cannot expect everything about the Revolution in six hundred pages—but he devotes some striking pages to social history, especially to the incredible luxury and depravity that prevailed in Paris after Thermidor among the classes who had made millions out of the Revolution, and to the extreme poverty of the workmen, whose industries had been ruined and who had no votes and no means of protesting except the pike and the barricade. He confirm.
the older view that the lands of the emigrt's and the Church were largely bought by the peasants, and not only by the existing landowners and the bourgeoisie as the late M. Jaures used to maintain. Indeed, if the whole nation had not, as it were, been made an accomplice in the spolia-
tion of the Church and the nobility, there would not haro been such a general acceptance of the Revolution on its social and economic sides. But we must not be tempted into discussing the many profoundly interesting problems raised by M. Madolin's remarkable book—by far the best short history of the Revolution, from its outset to the establish- ment of Bonaparte as First Consul, that has yet been written.
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